Why don’t more people speak at City Council meetings?

At the center of the City Council Chamber in City Hall, positioned so that the speaker faces an assembly of city leadership, there is a microphone stand.

It was stunning, today, how few people used it.

At 9 a.m., I was the first to arrive for today’s 9:30 a.m. snow response review meeting — the second council hearing on that topic, but the first to include a session of public comment. I was there to see who from the public would come to share their concerns about the December storms, and what they would say.

By 9:15 three people had arrived — two women and a man. All three, I later learned, were City Council regulars — a commendable achievement that nonetheless means they can be overlooked by reporters and politicians looking to gauge fresh public interest on a fresh public issue.

A few more people came, but only seven took the mic. Thousands of critical comments about the city’s snow response on our Web site and those of countless other media and blogs — yet only seven people spoke directly, in-person, to the council.

This is nothing new. Public sessions of local political boards rarely attract more than a handful of people — sometimes the same ones. Still. In a decade when we’re celebrating individual empowerment and civic engagement — at least online — you have to ask: Why not in City Hall?

Is it the timing? 9:30 a.m. is bad for just about anyone who works. Is it the content? Political meetings can be full of cryptic jargon and details that are hard to follow. Is it something else — a lack of familiarity with local politics, maybe, a sense that when the City Council calls for “public” comment, they are not, actually referring to you?

Or it could be the burden is on the other side. Maybe local leaders are behind the times when they so prioritize in-person public comment at official meetings. We’re in a digital age. Couldn’t they put up a projector, a computer link-up, some way to let citizens at home respond to council proceedings in real time, so all who are watching — reporters and councilmembers included — can see?

But to be fair, they’re not that behind at all. All Seattle city councilmembers have Web sites and e-mail addresses. Constituents can watch many meetings via a live online stream and on TV, and can submit comments directly to the council on the Web.

In-person public comment is only one of several ways people can speak truth to power. But with so many media, politicians and cameras gathered in that same room, it’s still the one that gets the most attention. The one with the greatest potential for swift public resonance.

Of course, lots of meetings have been well attended in the past. A hearing on the mayor’s proposed gun ban last month drew 70 speakers, many of them rallied by local advocacy groups.

But today’s meeting was about one of the biggest snow messes in recent memory, a storm that inconvenienced half the city — delaying bus times, stranding garbage bins and making it next to impossible for many people to drive down the street.

Comment on a blog and you can hope city councilmembers hear it. Stand at that mic at 600 4th Avenue, though, and you know they will.